I have disabled hardware acceleration in my chrome://settings. I have also visited chrome://flags and disabled every one of the flags listed in this post.

I restarted the system (and not just the browser), fired up chrome and here is the CPU usage graph shown in Windows Task Manager:

1 square (X-axis) = 5 seconds

The system was not connected to the internet when opening chrome. I only had 2 tabs restored in the window from last browsing session. I have only three browser extensions enabled at the moment:

HTTPS Everywhere 2015.8.13

ScriptSafe 1.0.6.18

ModHeader 2.0.5

What could be causing this much CPU usage, for such a large amount of time? As can be seen from the graph above, the CPU (including kernel times) stays at a constant 100% usage for at least 40 seconds.

After the usage drops down, it stays there for almost entire session, never going beyond 5%.

EDIT

Chrome does not allow me to access Chrome Task Manager unless it has finished consuming CPU entirely. After the process is finished, I noticed only the 5 processes enlisted above (2 tabs and 3 plug-ins/extensions).

The page chrome://plugins lists the following active plugins:

Widevine Content Decryption Module - Version: 1.4.8.823

Chrome PDF Viewer (2 files)

Native Client

Adobe Flash Player - Version: 18.0.0.209

In Windows Task Manager's processes list, I see that chrome distributes the CPU usage evenly to all chrome.exe processes listed there. Thus, each of them has about 10-12% of CPU assigned to them.

@magicandre1981 There is no flag regarding trace-export-events-to-etw. I'm downloading the package and will share the trace once done, if it is not dependent on the flag
– hjpotter92Oct 3 '15 at 17:13

1

only run this xperf command (the Win8.1 WPT also works in Win7, but not the Win10 WPT!!!) before you start chrome: pastebin.com/pgE11HRD after chrome is open and the CPU usage is gone, press a key to stop it.
– magicandre1981Oct 5 '15 at 4:22

I've listed the enabled plugins in the question above. I have tried restarting the browser after clearing caches. There was no effect whatsoever. In the Windows Task Manager, I see that chrome distributes CPU evenly to all the chrome.exe processes listed. I still have yet to try the great suspender app/extension though.
– hjpotter92Oct 3 '15 at 9:59